I'm a chef and in the restaurant culture drugs and alcohol are rampant. I probably couldn't have gotten away with my drinking if I did a different job. There's really no peer pressure to get sober since everyone I worked with drank every night. Of course, as I got older they stayed the same age. At some point it's silly to drink like a 21 year old when you're 41. I could see it in my face, I could feel it in my body. There's no other way to describe it than to say I felt like I was dying. I think what really got me to decide to stop was that feeling that I'd become a slave to the bottle. In the past I at least thought that I wanted to drink, that I was making a choice. Eventually though I watched the clock with a sense of foreboding and dread; even if I had decided in the morning that I wouldn't drink today the pressure would build as I watched the cutoff to buy get closer and closer. Ultimately I would always cave and make a run for booze even though I hated myself for it. Drinking was crowding out everything in my life; friends, family, girlfriends, etc. You couldn't count on me at all, I always made it to work but if you called me more than two hours after I got off I was already drunk. Life was passing me by as I sat on the sidelines drunk, watching it go.
I'm not sure that there was one single pivotal moment that made me stop. It was just the accumulation of decades of misery. When my dad died in 2011 I kind of went off the rails and my drinking got way worse. There was a span of a couple weeks where I just couldn't ignore the signs anymore. I summarized the epiphany in my sig line, but I realized that I had maybe two or three decades of life left in me, or a few more years of drinking. But not both, it was going to be one or the other.
George Carlin once said that in the beginning of drinking and drugging there's very little pain and a lot of pleasure, but that as time goes on it's a little pleasure and a lot of pain. At age 43 the math had flipped and it wasn't worth the pain of the physical symptoms and the misery of being enslaved by the bottle. At that point the choice became pretty clear.